Richard Henry Hypnagogia

Two Years Before the Mast, a memoir about a period of Richard Henry Dana's boyhood that was spent aboard a ship, is an extraordinary piece of work. A striking aspect of that memoir is the rhythm of the language in which it was written and the effect it can have on the reader.

I haven't read Dana's book lately but I remember with some accuracy some details about my immediate surroundings when I last read it, including the approximate hour of the day, the season of the year, the feel of the room in which I was lying in bed reading it, as well as the quality of the sounds coming in through the open window behind my head.  I even recall some of the things I'd been thinking about before picking up the book.  It occurs to me now that the reason that my memory of these details is so vivid might be the curious condition induced in my mind by the rhythm of the writing .  (It might be worth noting that the book was also written from memory.)

As one progresses through page after page of description about life at sea in the early part of the nineteenth century, the rhythm of the writing starts to take over and the sentences and paragraphs become like the periodic waves of the ocean.  One might even begin to feel a rocking sensation as the boat rises and falls while it moves through the water.

I remember reading that book and falling into a kind of trance in which I stopped actually reading the words on the page and started inventing them instead.  There was no perceptible threshold between the act of consciously reading the book in my hands and allowing the flow of language to emerge from a different source somewhere in my own imagination.  The story just continued seamlessly on and on for paragraph after paragraph as I watched myself rewriting Richard Henry Dana's account using exactly the same kind of language in the same meter and style and every other aspect of the writing.

Now here's the weird part.  That the writing might induce a hypnagogic condition in the reader is comprehensible as an experience one might have that might be reminiscent of the state of consciousness we tend to experience just before falling asleep.  What was different about the state that Dana's book produced in me, however, was that I was able to observe myself in the process of having that experience as it was occurring.  It was almost as if I had been split into two people, the one that had the hypnagogic experience and the other one that observed it, and the two of these characters existed and worked together in a kind of schizophrenic synchronization that I would like to be able to achieve, as it were, on my own.

Some mysterious aspects of this experience remain opaque to me, but in fact I believe this is what good writers actually do, and the discipline of writing requires that one learns how to perform such self-bifurcation.  This aspect of writing might be what Artur Rimbaud was referring to when he wrote the following tiny and brilliant line,

"Je est un autre."

the direct translation of which is

"I is another."

Note the change of perspective from first person to third that happens immediately after the "I."  There are two people existing together in this line.

Rober Frost said there has to be some accomplishment, and in his case such accomplishment would certainly include the use of rhyme. His poems provide a demonstration of the way in which rhyme can add a kind of punch to a poem, maybe because poetry has more in common with music than ordinary prose.

Meter, or rhythm, is obviously similar, and of course Frost uses it as effectively as he does rhyme.  It is probably the way in which he is able to integrate meter and rhyme that makes his poems so striking and easy to memorize.  (It's that music thing again.)  So, for example:

The witch who came, the withered hag,
to wash the steps with pail and rag,
was once the beauty Abishag,

the picture pride of Hollywood.
too many fall from great and good
for you to doubt the likelihood.
...

Nowadays there are categories of poetry that don't bother with such formalism, let alone things such as iambic pentameter and the difference between a sonnet and a ballad, etc.  (This is not to say that such new forms are devoid of accomplishment.)

But for me, something else about Frost's requirement for achievement is that the effort to comply with it might itself be actually helpful to the process of writing in a way that is not immediately apparent. First, it forces the writer to focus his/her conscious attention on the craft of writing to the near exclusion of all else, and now once again here comes the weird part.   

One might think that such a narrow focus on the details involved in the craft of writing would necessarily be at the expense of the content and meaning of the piece one is writing, but maybe the intensity of the technical focus actually liberates a different part of the mind existing under the radar of conscious awareness to freely wander around in something akin to a hypnagogic state, which is, once again, the condition we experience immediately before falling asleep that is so very imaginative and fertile.  

So here we are once again where I is another and the two of us work in unison with one unconsciously roaming around the universe and feeding thoughts and feelings and images to the other one who is wholly occupied with writing, writing, writing with an intensity of conscious control that is narrowly directed toward the bright little letters and words appearing on the page (or screen).    

I think this might be actually how it works.  The discipline of writing involves all sorts of technical knowledge and productive habits that include an acquired sensibility that allows bifurcation of a monolithic personality into separate entities that proceed to cooperate in releasing the flow of precisely controlled language onto the page.

That, in any case, is how I see it, though I'm not a psychologist or neurologist (nor was I an English or French major) and really have no freaking idea what I'm talking about.

Afterthought:  Might this be an example of right-brain/left-brain cooperation and is therefore nothing out of the ordinary?